L.A.’s Little Middle East

Anybody who thinks L.A.’s just a swarm of suburbs ought to visit downtown. Much of it is as urban as a swatch of Manhattan, full of tall buildings with a warren of cubbyhole businesses at street level.

Take the Jewelry District southeast of Pershing Square, an area that is also designated the Historic Core District. It has mid-block pedestrian crossings, cul-de-sacs full of shops and some unbelievably cramped parking structures. On its crowded sidewalks you hear the whole polyglot clamor of our town today: Spanish and Russian, Chinese and Korean, Persian and Arabic, Turkish and Armenian.

The languages of the Middle East are particularly prominent, because a lot of people from that part of the world are in the jewelry and precious-metals trade. So the streets around the big jewelry bazaars of Broadway and 7th Street host a number of Middle Eastern restaurants and delicatessens.

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1. On Hill Street a little south of Pershing Square there’s a busy--at times frenetic--little shop that sells candy, soft drinks, cigarettes and fast food. If you go by the menu over the counter, Cafe Hi mostly offers the usual American sandwiches and salads. But as is often the case in business names, ‘Hi’ represents Hai, the Armenian word for Armenian, and Cafe Hi also serves chicken and beef kebabs, grilled lamb chops and even grilled quail, as a look in the deli case shows. There’s tabbouleh salad there too, and you might hear somebody putting in an order for fattoush, the Lebanese salad with pita bread croutons.

Cafe Hi, 632 S. Hill Street, L.A. (213) 624-1212. Open 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

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2. Head north across 6th Street, turn right and you’ll soon come upon Sultan Restaurant, a bare-bones, mostly takeout place which has been moving roast chicken and shish kebab for 10 years. Along with posters of Lebanese tourist attractions (plus one of the Acropolis), its walls are graced with reviews clipped from the Downtown News and La Opinion (the latter explaining hummus for its Spanish-speaking readers).

Because its customers are in the neighborhood all day, Sultan is one of the few Middle Eastern restaurants in L.A. that has a breakfast menu. It lists eggs with Middle Eastern sausages (soujouk or maqaniq) or cheeses (haloumi, feta or kashkaval), plain boiled fava beans (ful mudammas) and the ultra-Middle Eastern breakfast dish: yogurt cheese (labneh) with olives, pickles and pita bread.

Lunch is mostly falafel, roast chicken, kefta (ground beef) kebab or shawarma (gyros), available either in sandwiches or in plates with hummus, rice or French fries and pita. (The sauce that comes with the roast chicken is savagely garlicky--it appears to be just pureed raw garlic.) Middle Eastern sausages are also available in sandwiches--the maqaniq (makanek) is strongly flavored with allspice and garnished with hummus, tomatoes and pickled turnips.

You can get baklava, the date-or nut-filled cookie maamoul and other Lebanese pastries, of course. There’s a list of possible daily specials, though I happen never to have found any available, and the menu says, ‘Don’t Forget, Wednesday is Fish Day.’

Sultan Restaurant, 311 W. 6th Street. (213) 236-0604, 236-0605, 236-9250. Breakfast 8 to 11:30 a.m.; 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

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3. Go to the corner of Broadway, cross 6th Street again and head south a couple of doors and you’ll be at Sunnin Middle Eastern Restaurant. Broadway may not quite realize what it has in this bright, newly opened place--it’s a branch of the highly regarded Sunnin in Westwood, whose owner, Em Toni Chammaa, used to cook at Al Amir, the upscale Lebanese restaurant that was located for many years near the L.A. County Museum of Art. In fact, the downtown Sunnin, run by Em Toni’s son, George, has inherited still another chef from Al Amir and even Al Amir’s stylish chairs.

Sunnin is the most ambitious of the neighborhood’s Middle Eastern restaurants, with an incipient second dining room and two pizza ovens turning out quantities of pastries, including the triangular spinach pie fatayer and flaky feta-stuffed filo cylinders called riqaqat (rekakat).

Its lunch dishes--as usual, available as sandwiches or plates--include beef and chicken kebabs (and chicken as well as beef shawarma), falafel fried really crisp and brown, arayes (a sort of Lebanese quesadilla made with pita bread and ground beef instead of tortillas and cheese) and sandwiches on French baguette bread. Its tabbouleh is remarkably light, a standing reproach to all the heavy, sludgy tabboulehs that American health-foodies have perpetrated over the years.

It offers Lebanese breakfasts--eggs with Middle Eastern sausages, ful mudammas, yogurt cheese with vegetables and kullaj, a sort of pizza topped with cheese, chopped tomatoes and green olives. And with those ovens, it boasts the freshest baklava in the neighborhood. In fact, Sunnin makes some of the best baklava anywhere in L.A., with the perfect texture of crisp, coy resistance all the way through a bite.

Sunnin Middle Eastern Restaurant, 6901/2 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, (213) 624-1650, 624-1865. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday; Sunday lunch.

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4. Cross Broadway and go down a little past the corner of 7th Street. There a marquee still reads City Burger but a yellow banner points you toward the renamed King Kabob, down an aisle that goes deep into a housewares store, passing a little jeweler’s workshop on the way. At the end, there are a couple of tables surrounded by prints for sale and a lunch counter serving an only-in-L.A. menu: yogurt-cucumber salad, chelo kebab and ghormeh sabzi, (the names written in both Persian and Armenian)

King Kabob, 716 S. Broadway, #1, (213) 955-5700. Open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.

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5. Cross Broadway again and walk a few doors west on 7th Street to Cherkez Bros., a real pioneer--it’s been here for 20 years. It’s a tiny place stocking Middle Eastern basics such as bulgur, lentils, nuts and daily fresh breads (including the ring-shaped Turkish sesame bread semit), and also imported Turkish pickles, preserves, pastries and even packaged Turkish pudding mixes.

Two deli cases stock sausages and cured meats, Danish butter and cream cheese and the usual Middle Eastern cheeses, plus the relatively rare tulum, a white cheese with a powerful blue cheese flavor. On high shelves around the shop there are bottles of limon cicegi kolonyasi, the fragrant lemon-blossom cologne they sprinkle on you in Turkish buses because it’s thought to allay motion sickness.

The shop makes sandwiches on either pita or French rolls with the usual American fillings, but also with Turkish cheeses, lamb tongue, feta with olive paste or hot soujouk sausage.

Cherkez Bros. Foods Store and Sandwich Shop, 306 W. 7th Street, (213) 627-1646. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

* Right across the street is St. Vincent Court, which extends about half a block into the St. Vincent Jewelry Market property (cars park on it, but since it’s not really a street, the addresses of its businesses are all given as if they were on either Broadway or Hill). St. Vincent Court could pass for a cul-de-sac in a corner of downtown Cairo or Istanbul, complete with waiters scurrying out to tables on the sidewalk carrying shish kebab plates or brass trays of tea or Turkish coffee. If you’re not hungry, you can browse in Sevan Video for cassettes and CDs of Turkish, Armenian and Greek pop music. You may have seen St. Vincent Court before, by the way--it’s been used as a location shot in movies.

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6. First up, on the west side of St. Vincent Court, is St. Vincent Deli, basically an American sandwich shop (very busy at lunch), except that some of the sandwiches are made with soujouk sausage or Middle Eastern cheeses. Its specialty is rather moist and flavorful doner kebab (gyros); it’s available in a sandwich or on pilaf with salad and pickles. The counter also displays a small selection of baklava from Yeznik Tamazyan bakery in Glendale.

St. Vincent Deli, 650 S. Hill Street, (213) 629-3345.

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7. Super Grill, on the other side of the court, is more clearly Armenian, serving the yogurt soup sepas and the lentil soup vospabour. Besides American sandwiches (including a Philly cheesesteak and a hamburger), this bright, colorful place makes beef and chicken kebabs and shawarmas and two items you can also find on Armenian restaurant menus in south Glendale: pork shish kebab (actually, two pork chops) and sturgeon kebab (asetrina, a phonetic spelling of the Russian word for sturgeon).

Super Grill, 639 S. Broadway, Suite 105, (213) 624-5644. Open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

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8. Next door is Garos Deli, the only market I’ve ever been in where a clerk who couldn’t explain something in English hopefully asked, ‘Do you speak Turkish?’ Like it or not, the other nations of the eastern Mediterranean acknowledge that the Turks know their food. This fairly large deli is full of Turkish imports: canned goods, pastries, even packaged convenience foods like bulgur with a tomato flavoring (domatesli bulgur), plain noodles cut an inch long (kesme makarna) and tripe soup mix (iskembe).

By the door there’s a display of Turkish and Armenian breads (and some water pipes for sale) and a freezer case holding Armenian/Turkish meat pastries boereg (borek) for baking and the miniature dumplings called manti, meant to be baked in a tray of broth. Nearby are some imported Turkish sweetmeats, including saray helvasi, with an extraordinary fragile, almost dust-like texture that has been compared to a mouthful of cocoa straight from the box.

Near that is the counter, which displays crisp Greek sesame snacks, Turkish chewing gum and the like. In a deli case there are baklava-type pastries (one with a little chocolate) and kaymak, a clotted cream almost as thick as butter--it’s sold in rolled-up sheets. Beyond that, there are cases of cheeses and a variety of European sausages, behind which are shelves of backgammon boards for sale (there may also be some people playing backgammon in a back room here).

Like most restaurants in the neighborhood it sells American sandwiches, but it also makes roast chicken, a couple of soups and various omelets with Middle Eastern sausages or cheeses. A real treat is a sandwich of kaymak and Turkish honey on a French roll.

Garos Deli, 635 S. Broadway, A22, (213) 622-1161; 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

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9. Deepest in the cul-de-sac, Farid Restaurant is the elegant dining spot of this neighborhood, complete with swag curtains, pink walls sponged with gold paint, some Persian genre paintings and a gold Chinese screen. The menu is the usual Persian chelo kebab list--beef, chicken and lamb kebabs served with rice pilaf, a grilled tomato and pickles. The kebabs are also available in sandwich form, wrapped in lavash bread with cucumbers, lettuce and Persian pickled cucumbers (they come with a barely dressed salad of lettuce and very red tomatoes). It also has a couple of the classic Persian stews that are served on pilaf, ghormeh sabzi (greens) and gheimeh bademjan. (eggplant). Braised lamb shank goes particularly well with ‘green pilaf’ (baghali polo, made with lima beans and dill).

Farid Restaurant Persian Cuisine, 635 S. Broadway, A35, (213) 622-0808. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday.